[Actionchix] HTML helping hands

jennyw jennyw at dangerousideas.com
Thu Mar 16 10:23:52 EST 2006


Mary wrote:
 > At the moment, the arugment is that our pages don't auto-validate. And
 > there are a *lot* of people who still use:
 >
 > <ul>
 > <li>list item 1
 > <li>list item 2
 > </ul>
 >
 > which is not XHTML. Some of these people willbe writing content for us
 > *after* the transition. Unless the CMS auto-validates and cleans HTML,
 > XHTML will be hard to continually maintain.

We might be able to do that. I'd propose trying this:

* We strongly suggest that unless contributors feel comfortable with 
xhtml, to use either a humane text format or a visual editor that 
produced xhtml output. All new users would be setup to use one or the 
other by default. Plone includes ReStructured Text[1] as a humane text 
format and Kupu[2] as a visual editor (Plone supports older options as 
well, like Structured Text and Epoz, but I'd suggest keeping things simple).

* If people choose to be responsible for xhtml, we send their documents 
through a validator. If a document is invalid, we give them the option 
of a) fixing it themselves; or b) running it through HTML Tidy[3]. If we 
want to avoid possible data loss by running through Tidy (which I think 
is a low probability), then we could also offer option c) saving anyway, 
but with the understanding that a notice will be sent to Web volunteers 
(either a help desk type system or a mailing list). Of course, offering 
option c would potentially be aggravating and difficult to manage.

* Write a robot to periodically crawl the site and check the pages 
against a validator.

Jen

1: http://docutils.sourceforge.net/rst.html
2: http://kupu.oscom.org/
3: http://tidy.sourceforge.net/



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